It’s been going on for years. Techwood Homes was the first Federal housing project, opened by FDR in 1936 (-ish); it was torn down before the 1996 Olympics, replaced with the Olympic village (now dorms for Georgia Tech and Georgia State) and mixed-income apartments.
East Lake Meadows, one of the worst projects in the area, was razed 8 or 9 years ago and replaced with a mixed-income community. The nearby golf course, once Bobby Jones’ home course, was revitalized and has hosted at least one PGA championship (I don’t follow golf) and a ton of pro-am and charity tournaments. I have several friends who’ve bough houses in East Lake, in areas where none of us would want to be caught after dark just a decade ago.
It’s not just Atlanta. Chicago’s Cabrini Green, one of the largest, most ambitious and most infamously drug-, crime- and gan-riddled projects, is no more.
As I’ve been saying for years, the War on Poverty is over, and we won. Our “poor” have color TVs, two cars and air conditioning. Their primary nutritional problem is not malnutrition, but obesity.
Housing projects made sense when the problem was a lack of decent, basic shelter, when people were living in shanty towns with leaky roofs, no running water, and third-world sanitation. Food stamps made sense when the problem was hunger — literally, folks suffering severe and chronic ailments from malnutrition.
Those days are gone. The problem today is not a lack of food or shelter, but a lack of family and community. Housing projects are nothing but stockyards for a permanent underclass, grim places devoid of much hope for the future. Children who grow up there grow up with no positive role models, because by definition success means leaving the projects. The only folks who have any material success, who have anything interesting going on, are the pimps, drug-dealers and gang-bangers.
Getting poor families into real neighborhoods gives those kids examples to follow. Folks who get up in the morning and go to work, and reap the rewards. Whether they’re on Indian reservations, in urban housing projects, or in the Appalachian backwoods, what perpetually poor families need is integration to the American mainstream — it may be too late for some of the adults, but at least the children can see that there is a better life within their reach, and the way to get to it is to stay in school and work for it.
And not to put a damper on FR’s favorite pastime, but sometimes an idea makes so darn much sense that it ceases to be partisan. Enterprise zones were Jack Kemp’s pet project as Bush 41’s HUD secretary, and were then adopted enthusiastically by the Clinton administration. Atlanta’s mayors, city council members and housing board members have been almost all Democrats, but they’ve been supported in this new direction by both Republicans and Democrats at the county, state and federal level. It’s a rare and heartening example of folks wiling to admit that something works and get behind it, even if the other guy thought of it.
It’s like the old saying, no matter where you go, there you are.
Just changing the location of a person doesn’t change their way of thinking. Yes, the environment plays a role, but it isn’t the only thing that needs to change.
sec 8 alone doesn’t work.
The flaw in the theory is that the role models will leave in short order, or where they live Sec. 8 housing is not taken by landlords.
In Chicago there are a group of small towns on the southeast edge of Chicago that are highly concentrated with Sec. 8 housing. On the northern end of Chicago you have some of the most affluent towns in the country. They don't have any Sec. 8 housing. How did the Sec. 8 housing tenants end up in the southeast suburbs?